Intent to package: paul

[Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de>]

Hello,

for some special purposes I wrote a kind of an image viewer named

   paul = _P_rogram zur _A_uswertung und _U_mwandlung von _L_aserbildern

(for non German speakers: Program to evaluate and convert laser images).
The background is that I take some pictures of crystals using a
highspeed filmcamera which works with laser light.

The intention is to get a "digital" film.  Using a slide-scanner
(Nikon LS-20) I scan the images by a program derived from SANE's
xscanimage (I changed xscanimage to get PNG-images with special
chunks I want to use in paul).

So what is PAUL:
Short:
   Yet another image viewer.
Longer:
   - Special designed for *sequences* of images.
   - Works best with gray-scaled images, but can handle any 24-Bit
     images, off course
     (Remark: Gray scaled images are *displayed* green! It has
      technical reasons to use the other colors internally.  Don't
      be afraid that your output will be green.  It's normal monochrom
      image.)
   - GTK userinterface (this is work in progress, some features
     of paul are only available via command line ... the former flavour
     of paul)
   - available to do several transformations quiet in background
     (may be any console)
   - Because of using Imlib it is *fast* and can handle any image
     format.
   - May be it's possible to do all the image processing stuff of
     paul with GIMP.  But the special features are easier available
     and designed for only this special purpose (may be I write
     some parts of paul as plug-in for gimp).
     The function to cut parts of an image is (that means will be
     because it isn't finished yet) better, i.e. more minute than
     this one of the gimp, because it is possible to posittion the
     cutting box via entering pixel coordinates ... yet another
     (not seen by me) philosophy of cutting an image.
   - May be you can view your images using XV, but paul is free.
     It's no problem to release paul under GPL.  I don't want to
     compete with any other image viewer like xv or display, but
     I don't use them since several month.
   - Yet another userinterface:
     Paul works with the following menu structure:
         File: (what would you expect under this item :))
         This Image: Operation to single image
         Marked Images: Operation on all marked images
         All Images: Operation on all loaded images
         Parameters: Set global parameters for the tree operation types
   - There are bugs, there are many bugs, I expect.
     Some parts are not finished yet (the rubber box to cut images)
   - There is in fact no documentation.
     There is an old documentation from an old command line driven
     version of paul in German.
     Im sure that there will be no English documentation, because this
     program was designed for German native speakers at my working
     group and parts of this documentation will go into my theses.
     If there will be a greater resonance I could think about English
     documentation but not before October next year.

Why do I want to put paul into Debian?
- May be there is need for such a thing?
- I want to do more than only package things.
- May be someone can use some ideas of paul?
- May be that more people can detect more bugs and I can make paul
  more stable.

Please tell me if there is some interest in such a program.
Sorry, it isn't available at this time via ftp to
let you have a personal impression.  If someone is interested
personally, I will make it available soon (it need some overwork --
configure stuff).

Kind regards

      Andreas.